Latest official estimates put it at up to 1.7 million gallons per day

David Camardelle, the Democratic mayor of Grand Isle, La., complained of red tape in the cleanup plans.

David Camardelle, the Democratic mayor of Grand Isle, La., complained of red tape in the cleanup plans.

Photo: Win McNamee, Getty Images

Anger rises along with spill size estimate

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Oil is flowing from a blown-out well in the Gulf of Mexico almost twice as fast — at minimum — as estimated previously, although some of it is now being captured, federal officials said Thursday.

Their estimates now range from 20,000 to 40,000 barrels per day, said U.S. Geological Survey Director Marcia McNutt — well above the most recent estimate of 12,000 to 19,000 barrels per day, and vastly higher than BP's original reckoning of 1,000 to 5,000 barrels in the days after the April 20 blowout.

The high end of the estimate, 40,000 barrels, would represent almost 1.7 million gallons a day.

The new numbers estimate the rate before underwater robots cut a bent riser pipe that once connected the Macondo well, a mile below the Gulf's surface, with the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig that exploded after the blowout, killing 11 workers.

Cutting the riser pipe on June 3 temporarily increased the total flow, but BP now is catching more than 15,000 barrels a day through a new pipe that was attached to the severed riser the next day.

BP is preparing in the next few days to siphon more oil from the spewing wellhead.

And as it tries to slow down the amount of oil surging into the Gulf, the company agreed to speed up payments to businesses and residents affected by the spill, responding to public outcry and government pressure.

BP also promised to take into account that many of the industries most affected by the spill — including fishing and tourism — make the bulk of their income in the summer months.

“We wanted to make sure they are calculating the damages to those individuals based on the earnings they would get in that short period of time, not dividing an annual salary by 12,” said Tracy Wareing, with the National Incident Command coordinating spill response.

Mounting frustration

BP officials also will meet with President Barack Obama next week to discuss the company's financial responsibility. So far, it has paid more than $57 million to fishermen, deckhands and other workers who have lost wages and business because of the spill.

BP and the Obama administration faced mounting frustration and anger Thursday as lawmakers and Gulf Coast officials complained that efforts to clean up the crude are being stalled by a Byzantine response operation

“We're at war here,” said Billy Nungesser, the Republican president of Plaquemines Parish, La. “I have spent more time fighting the officials of BP and the Coast Guard than fighting the oil.”

David Camardelle, the Democratic mayor of Grand Isle, La., said his hands are tied while he waits for BP and the Coast Guard to sign off on cleanup plans. “Please send us some help,” Camardelle pleaded, his voice breaking, as he testified in an emotional Senate homeland security subcommittee hearing.

The pair described sluggish decision-making, with it taking more than five days to navigate cleanup requests around layers of approval and other hurdles and get them to the top Coast Guard officials coordinating the response.

Disputes over control

Lawmakers on Thursday drew fresh comparisons to the government's widely criticized response when Hurricane Katrina hit the New Orleans area in 2005.

“The people that are on the ground, either up to their chin in water or up to their knees in oil, in this case, don't seem to have the resources or authority to get the job done,” said a teary Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La.

Juliette Kayyem, an assistant Homeland Security secretary, said the Coast Guard is working to make sure local officials have control over some issues in their backyards, such as decisions involving boom being deployed to trap floating oil.

Forty miles off the Louisiana coast, meanwhile, BP engineers continued to draw oil through the pipe installed last week, and worked on systems they expect will capture more of the oil.

BP engineers have been working on another pumping system that would be able to draw as much as an additional 10,000 barrels per day from the well.

That hardware is the same used unsuccessfully to pump drilling mud into the well in an earlier effort to plug it, now reversed to work as a vacuum. At the surface, it will separate crude and natural gas from the well and burn both since it cannot store them.

No room to add tanker

“To capture it, we'd have to bring in another tanker, and having all that in this small space would make it too congested,” BP Senior Vice President Kent Wells said Thursday.

BP engineers are also working on a system that could lift oil to tankers in rough seas, and could be disconnected temporarily if a hurricane threatened.

The new flow estimates announced Thursday were the work of three teams of scientists employed by the federal government, universities and independent research institutions.

The estimates varied widely, from as low as 12,600 barrels per day to as high as 50,000 barrels. But McNutt said the scientists generally agreed that the mid-range figures, from 20,000 to 40,000 barrels per day, were the most likely.

Reviewing the response

The problem that has plagued scientists and engineers from the start is that the Macondo well sits a mile beneath the surface, where only robots can work, and that they've never dealt with a blowout that deep.